hybrid clouds – Cloud Computing Today

Avere Systems Raises $14M in Series E Funding for Storage Solutions for Hybrid Clouds

Avere Systems recently announced the finalization of $14M in Series E funding. The Series E funding raise features a new investor, namely, Google Inc., and existing investors Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and Western Digital Capital. Avere Systems specializes in storage products and solutions that optimize the performance of storage infrastructures for hybrid cloud environments by empowering customers to access stored files, whether they are stored in the cloud or on premise, without sacrifices to file availability or performance. In recognition of the need to manage, scale and optimize storage solutions for on-premise storage as well as cloud-based storage, Avere Systems delivers a portfolio of products and services that help ease enterprise adoption of cloud computing, with a specialization in the intersection of storage and hybrid cloud deployments. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, the company has raised a total of $97M to date.

The Series E funding raise is notable because of Google’s addition to Avere’s roster of investors as well as the continued support of Western Digital Capital, the venture capital firm associated with Western Digital. The ability of Avere Systems to garner high profile investors with deep investments in enterprise storage such as Google and Western Digital speaks to its success in gaining traction in the rapidly growing hybrid cloud space. That Avere Systems has been able to carve out a niche with respect to facilitating high performance access to data for computational and long-term storage purposes underscores the success of its strategy to serve the storage needs of organizations that leverage a plurality of on-premise and cloud-based infrastructures. The funding will be used to support product development and innovation for Avere System’s customers with a specific focus on expanding its portfolio of products for the hybrid cloud.

Automic Software Version 12 Brings Enhanced Automation To Digital Transformation Initiatives Related To Hybrid Clouds

On October 4, Automic Software (Automic) announced the release of version 12 of its suite of products designed to enhance business automation and agility for enterprise operations teams. Responding to the challenges faced by operations teams in the wake of increasing cloud adoption, Automic delivers software that enhances the ability of enterprise operations teams to collaborate with DevOps resources and initiatives. Automic’s suite of business automation software applications helps organizations deploy and manage workloads across multiple environments as well as manage releases across a multitude of platforms and infrastructures. In addition, Automic Software orchestrates the delivery of automation throughout the technology stack, giving enterprises greater operational agility and efficiency with respect to the automation of manual processes.

Automic Software helps organizations navigate the challenge of transitioning workloads to the cloud by giving operations teams the tools to monitor and optimize applications that are hosted within hybrid cloud infrastructures. The company’s bevy of automation tools empowers customers to manage a fleet of applications in the cloud as illustrated by the dashboard below:

The graphic above, for example, shows how administrators can use Automic Software to quickly identify failed jobs in addition to relevant trends. Automic Software delivers analytics across disparate database and application siloes, thereby giving customers holistic insights that facilitate iteratively nuanced optimization, troubleshooting and architectural design. Automic’s new unified interface and new unified reporting and analytics tool provides customers with a consistent interface for queries and reports that collectively simplify and streamline the process of monitoring applications and the infrastructure on which they are hosted, regardless of whether the hosting environment in question features a cloud-based, on-premise or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Moreover, version 12 of the platform allows administrators to perform upgrades with zero downtime in addition to the ability to encapsulate applications for the purpose of expedited migration and deployment across different environments. Aimed at operations teams who have been tasked with managing a multitude of applications in the cloud, but lack the appropriate set of tools required to automate application upgrades, manage workloads and application releases, Automic Software seeks to ease the pain of cloud adoption by giving administrators a holistic set of tools to manage their portfolio of cloud-based applications. Expect Automic Software to expand its footprint in the space of business automation products as DevOps practices proliferate and correspondingly intensify the need for platforms capable of easing the burden of operations teams responsible for maintaining applications within hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Rubrik Raises $41M In Series B Funding For Appliance-Based, Enterprise Backup And Recovery

This week, Rubrik announced the finalization of $41M in Series B funding led by Greylock Partners with additional participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and angel investors. In conjunction with the funding raise, Rubrik revealed its r300 Series Hybrid Cloud Appliance that is implemented alongside the company’s Converged Data Management Platform. Rubrik’s hybrid cloud appliance delivers enterprise backup and recovery services while allowing customers to take advantage of the economics of public clouds to not only backup data, but to also recover data from the cloud. The appliance frees customers from the need to manager servers, hard drives and backup software by delivering an integrated, highly scalable infrastructure for backing up on premise data and subsequently leveraging public clouds to supplement the appliance’s storage capabilities. This week’s funding raise brings the total capital raised by Rubrik to $51M and illustrates investor and market interest in converged infrastructures as evinced by Vapor IO and Mesosphere. Meanwhile, the capital raise also affirms the enduring vitality of innovative enterprise backup and recovery solutions that tap into enterprise interest in using public clouds for recovery purposes as well as backup in the vein of players such as Axcient.

Avere Systems Partners With Google Cloud Platform To Deliver Hybrid Clouds For Compute And Storage Intensive Workloads

On Monday, Avere Systems announced a partnership with Google that empowers customers to transfer large data sets and workloads to the Google Cloud Platform. The collaboration between Avere Systems and Google means that companies can now transfer data from NAS storage systems to the Google Cloud Platform to enjoy the benefits of the scalability and performance of the same infrastructure that powers Google search, Gmail and Google Drive. Avere FXT Edge Filers technology from Avere Systems allows customers to run storage and compute workloads both on premise and in the cloud, thereby creating a hybrid cloud infrastructure optimized for cloud bursting scenarios and compute-intensive workloads. Avere Physical FXT Edge Filers deliver NAS for on-premise, file-based applications whereas Virtual FXT Edge Filers provides a software solution that manages a high performance storage infrastructure within a cloud-based platform. The combination of Avere Physical and Virtual FXT Filers allows customers to deploy solutions on premise and in the cloud while delivering high performance and low latency for big data applications. Because of its ability to support compute-intensive workloads and massive storage requirements, Avere Edge Filer technology has enjoyed notable success within the media and entertainment industry as evinced by its usage by the visual effects studio Framestore. The ability of Avere Systems to support the massive computational and storage needs of digital media and entertainment-related use cases strongly positions Avere Systems to support the needs of organizations that need to create a compute and storage intensive hybrid cloud infrastructure in collaboration with Google Cloud Platform.

Cloudyn Announces Support For Microsoft Azure For Cloud Performance And Cost Analytics

Cloud monitoring leader Cloudyn today announced its support for the Microsoft Azure cloud. Cloudyn’s support of Azure means complements its existing support for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack, thereby rendering it compatible with an even wider range of hybrid cloud infrastructures. Cloudyn specializes in performance management across a variety of cloud infrastructures by means of a unified user interface. In addition to performance management, Cloudyn also delivers cost tracking and optimization services that allow customers to control costs by optimizing resource and infrastructure allocations across different infrastructures and applications. The following screenshot of Cloudyn’s management dashboard illustrates the cost-tracking functionality of the Cloudyn platform:

Cloudyn’s data visualization functionality provides customers with nuanced drill-downs of cost by entity, cost savings opportunities and trend analytics of cost over time. By supporting Microsoft Azure, Cloudyn provides customers with the ability to understand how an Azure deployment alters the cost and performance equation in a hybrid cloud infrastructure that might alternatively include an on-premise OpenStack deployment as well as use of Amazon Web Services. Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner commented on the significance of the company’s support for Azure as follows:

We’re thrilled to add support of Microsoft Azure to our set of cloud platforms. Our customers’ interests in Azure adoption have grown rapidly. From the onset, we’ve been committed to helping our customers ease into the multi-cloud model as well as successfully manage it. Now we’ll be able to further help them cut down on cloud spend while avoiding cloud sprawl.

In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Wagner noted that all performance metrics collected from the cloud infrastructures that Cloudyn supports reside on the same table, giving Cloudyn the unique capability to perform cross-cloud performance and cost comparisons. Cloudyn’s ability to deliver rich and nuanced analytics for hybrid cloud deployments renders it a powerful tool for contemporary cloud deployments, the vast majority of which necessarily embrace some combination of private and public cloud environment. Today’s announcement of its support for Azure represents yet another important milestone for Cloudyn, particularly as it seeks to add even more cloud platforms to the list of infrastructures it supports for performance and cost analytics.